


Up and Out and Through

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [16]
Category: Kurzgesagt, Original Work
Genre: Apocalypse, Climate Crisis, Gen, Rogue Planet, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:40:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24053779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: A thousand words on trying to live outside the world.
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Kudos: 3





	Up and Out and Through

So. [Begin here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7CkdB5z9PY)

A rogue planet spins through outer space, alone and without a star. Just a small speck of a world covered by a thick armour of ice, but underneath the ice, heated by the planet’s core, there’s an ocean still. In that subglaceal ocean, near hydrothermal vents, life was born, and life spread out into the cold seas, developed into sentience, into a civilization, maybe into multiple side-by-side species building their own civilizations, sometimes at war, sometime at peace. Maybe soft clever cephalopod-like creatures, maybe hard-shelled iron-scaled gastropod peoples, maybe worm-creatures that attach themselves to cliff-walls, for whom mobility is the task of the next generation, because they themselves cannot, will not move. Maybe complicated symbionts, maybe something more alien than we can imagine. What matters is this – they live in a world where the ground is the seafloor and the sky is a dome of ice kilometers thick. That is the world, that is all there has ever been. Some of their scientists (once they develop science) guess at a world outside the world, they measure quakes and monitor radiations and posit that the ice has an other side, that there is another place, up and out and through. Some make guesses about what that other world may be like, some theorize that there might be other life-giving cores, or something the cores take their heat from. But that’s all academic, it’s metaphysics, it’s probably true but it probably isn’t relevant. Real scientists don’t look up and out at the barren, frozen walls of the world, they look in and down into the core and the mantle and the vents, the glowing heart that beats at the centre of their world.  
  
But those that look to the depths eventually notice, they have to notice, that the planet’s life is winding down, that the core is cooling. The change is almost imperceptibly slow, but it’s almost imperceptibly speeding up. The core gets cooler and cooler, the vents are exhausted, the ocean itself begins to cool, degree by degree, and as it cools, the ice sheet that is the sky begins to grow and grow until it encroaches on settlements, until it threatens to smother civilizations, but it won’t stop there, it will grow until no liquid water is left and all is ice. The world will cool and shrink and diminish until it is all gone. It is going to happen, they know it, it is a scientific certainty, a foregone conclusion. They know that this is happening, that their entire world’s end is in sight. They will all die, their entire civilization will be extinguished and lie forever in a forgotten grave.

Some accept it, and resolve to live good and righteous lives right up to the end. Some despair, shred their soft limbs on the inexorable ice, go bad, go mad, kill themselves and others in droves. And some decide to get out. The other side, up and out and through, has only ever been theorized about, but they are going to have to find a way to get there, they are going to have to find a way to escape the world and live outside of it.

It’s hard to think of a world outside the world, hard to even speak of it. Their world is the sea, how can there be a world outside of it? How can the thin, shivery rays of energy that pass through the ice be the messages of another world, if the world ends where the ice begins? Many of those who pin their hopes on finding the world beyond the ice begin to speak of it as another sea, because they have no concept of a world that is not also a sea. The scientists know that this is nowhere near accurate, but it’s still the best words they have for something quite unspeakable. So, for lack of better words, they call it the outer sea, a boundless dark ocean of unwater where small planktonic motes of life float, inconceivably distant from one another.

But understanding what must be done is not enough, the work of passing though the ice is more than strenuous, it is impossible, it literally requires the world to be broken. Generations have to live and die chipping away at the wall of the world, and it isn’t enough, it takes more. Maybe some wild crazed cephalopod scientist realizes, that to go out, you must go in, and to get away, you must return: they channel much of the remaining heat of the mantle into a massive volcanic eruption, destroying much of what is left of the world, only to melt through that impassable wall.

And when they first break through to the surface, the real work and the real terror begins. They don’t find a solution, they find an even colder world with no liquid water and ever-present deadly radiation. They cannot breathe the thin little atmosphere of their planet, none of them can spend much time outside the sea, and some of them cannot even move outside the water, not at all. Their graceful rubbery limbs collapse into a pathetic wiggling heap and they are dead in a minute unless returned to the world. The radiation that seemed thin and paltry through kilometers of ice is stronger here, strong enough to power machinery and spark new inventions, but also strong enough to kill the inventors, to burn them from the inside out. It turns out you cannot live outside the world.

Despair takes many. But others still look outwards for hope, and decide that if the world is dying and one cannot live outside the world, the only choice is to find another world. They cannot see the stars – being creatures of a lightless subglacial ocean, most of them are mostly blind – but they can measure them, and the little pinpoints of hope and life are no less beautiful for being invisible. So those who want to feed on the star-plankton of the outer sea have to find a way to survive on its cruel shore, to hold on to life on the wrong side of their world, the cold, dry, burning, hostile side of it, at least until they find a way to leave it. It will cost them a lot, it will mean unthinkable sacrifice of millions of lives, and even those who live will live lives that are strange and warped and incomprehensible in any framework they have previously known, and yet, they keep living and dying. Until they build the submarine that can travel out and further out.

**Author's Note:**

> More than a year ago, when I was on a very tight deadline, I tried to focus, tried not to get distracted from the task on hand, then I looked out of a train window for three seconds, and the last two fictional influences rattling around in my head (HBO Chernobyl and the first two installments of Broken Earth) clashed together with an infotainment video about rogue planets, and a setting idea planted itself in my mind. It was bright and cold and frankly an unsettling experience, and I want to share it with you, since just like most of my ideas, it’s weird and impossible for me to write, and thus will never become an actual novel.


End file.
